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Born in the Bronx on June 12, 1954, Donald Revell is a graduate of SUNY-Binghamton and SUNY-Buffalo. His first collection of poems, From the Abandoned Cities, was published by Harper & Row in 1983.

Since then, he has published several collections, including Drought-Adapted Vine (Alice James Books, 2015), Essay: A Critical Memoir (Omnidawn Publishing, 2015), The Bitter Withy (Alice James Books, 2009), A Thief of Strings (Alice James Books, 2007), Pennyweight Windows: New And Selected Poems (Alice James Books, 2005), My Mojave (Alice James Books, 2003), Arcady (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), There Are Three (Wesleyan University Press, 1998), Beautiful Shirt (Wesleyan University Press, 1994), Erasures (Wesleyan University Press, 1992), New Dark Ages (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), and The Gaza of Winter (University of Georgia Press, 1988).

He has also translated two volumes of the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire: Alcools (1995) and The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems (2004), both from Wesleyan University Press.

Revell's essays have appeared in The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye (Graywolf Press, 2007) and Invisible Green: Selected Prose (OmniDawn, 2005)

His honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Shestack Prize, the Gertrude Stein Award, the PEN Center USA Award for poetry, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Ingram Merrill and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial foundations.

Editor of Denver Quarterly from 1988-94, Revell has been a poetry editor of Colorado Review since 1996. He has taught at the Universities of Tennessee, Missouri, Iowa, Alabama, and Denver. Since 1994, he has been a professor of English at the University of Utah, where he serves as director of the creative writing program.

Revell currently lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan, and their son, Benjamin.

Gihon

They all wore little hats
Vermont that I
Can see, the river its coronet
Of yellow beetles—crawling,
Flying—the flowers wearing
The river for a hat.
I can see that
When I stand alone
Upon this acre as now
Sober and living, the same, the same.
They wore:
Hats.
They are not dead,
John and Johnny and John,
Which is a fine name for a river,
Only gone.
Having death out of the way,
The ill-fitting suicide discarded,
Pajama-like, on imaginary sand:
Good, good. We stand.

Donald Revell

by this poet

It doesn't matter
A damn what's playing—
In the dead of winter
You go, days of 1978 -
79, and we went
Because the soldiers were beautiful
And doomed as Asian jungles
Kept afire Christ-like
In the hopeless war
I did not go to in the end
Because it ended.
The 20th-century?
It was a war
Between peasants on the one

Sha-
Dow,
As of
A meteor
At mid-
Day: it goes
From there.
A perfect circle falls
Onto white imperfections.
(Consider the black road,
How it seems white the entire
Length of a sunshine day.)
Or I could say
Shadows and mirage
Compensate the world,
Completing its changes
With no change.
In the morning after a

Virgil watched them
Crossing the river away from him
The fathers without their children
Only a little while
Was he smiling
-Ly
-Ily
At Death the Golden Age
Falling backwards
In the Chinese restaurant
The tiniest fireman
I could see that he was smiling
Plenty of children in Arcady without fathers
Our friends

related poems

Because I am not married, I have the skin of an orange
that has spent its life in the dark. Inside the orange
I am blind. I cannot tell when a hand reaches in
and breaks the atoms of the blood. Sometimes
a blackbird will bring the wind into my hair.
Or the yellow clouds falling on the

Napoleon's hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous hat, but that's not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all honesty wasn't much different than the one any jerk might buy at a corner drugstore now, except for two

Lest by diminished vitality and abated
vigilance, I become food for crocodiles—for that quicksand
of gluttony which is legion. It is there close at hand—
on either side
of me. You remember the Israelites who said in pride
and stoutness of heart: "The bricks are fallen